Could a solar flare destroy modern civilization?

[westwall]

Westwall, can you get any stupider? No hysteria, just plain facts and evidence. And confirmation of the facts and evidence in the grocery store.

We are no longer waiting to see what the consequences will be, we are experiancing them right now in the increasing weather events worldwide. The meteorlogical records and insurance records all confirm the increase in number and severity of weather events. From the price of bread to the cost of a jar of peanut butter, we see the result.

Now you can lie about this all you want, but everyone now sees these prices increasing because of the impacts of weather on agriculture.

Sure thing MENSA BOY. I give you this little ditty from you extremeist alarmist camp...The price increases are due to the increased cost of fuel imposed on the people by the warmists idiotic carbon taxes and other efforts to eliminate fossil fuels. Nice try moron, but YOU are the cause of the higher prices not weather.

"Disruption of Ocean circulation: It is very likely that the climate change will bring in disruption of ocean circulation patterns that keep northern European countries in a suitable temperate range."


Consequences of Climate Change - Predictions From Climate Models

 

[Old Rocks]

Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs | The Energy Collective

In 2009, Lester Brown and Scientific American asked “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” This summer’s extreme global weather raised fears of a “Coming Food Crisis,” as CAP’s John D. Podesta and Jake Caldwell warned in Foreign Policy: “Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse.”

Now the Financial Times reports the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s “food price index, a basket tracking the wholesale cost of wheat, corn, rice, oilseeds, dairy products, sugar and meats, has jumped to a record high, surpassing in December the peak of the 2007-08 food crisis” (see figure).

As ClimateWire and SciAm explains,”world food prices hit a record high in December thanks to crop failures from a series of extreme weather events around the world“:

 

[Old Rocks]

http://chge.med.harvard.edu/publications/documents/agricultureclimate.pd

We highlight the following conclusions regarding the current state of the U.S. agricultural sector:


Since the 1970s, U.S. agriculture has achieved enhanced productivity, but has also experienced
greater variability in crop yields, prices, and farm income. The changes in variability
are, in part, climate-related, either directly (through extreme weather events) or
indirectly (due to agricultural pests and diseases).


Extreme weather events have caused severe crop damage and have exacted a significant
economic toll for U.S. farmers over the last 20 years. Total estimated damages, of which
agricultural losses are a part, from the 1988 summer drought were on the order of $56 billion
(normalized to 1998 dollars using an inflation wealth index), while those from the
1993 Mississippi River Valley floods exceeded $23 billion.


Both pest damage and pesticide use have increased since 1970. Nationally, in the 1990s,
pests were estimated to have destroyed about one third of our crops, in spite of advances
in pest control technology over the last half century.


The ranges of several important crop pests in the U.S., including the soybean cyst nematode
[the most destructive soybean pest in the U.S.] and corn gray leaf blight [the major
disease causing corn yield losses] have expanded since the early 1970s, possibly in
response, in part, to climate trends.


Pest and disease occurrences often coincide with extreme weather events and with
anomalous weather conditions, such as early or late rains, and decreased or increased
humidity, which by themselves can alter agricultural output. Recent climate trends, such
as increased nighttime and winter temperatures, may be contributing to the greater prevalence
of crop pests.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Westwall, can you get any stupider? No hysteria, just plain facts and evidence. And confirmation of the facts and evidence in the grocery store.

We are no longer waiting to see what the consequences will be, we are experiancing them right now in the increasing weather events worldwide. The meteorlogical records and insurance records all confirm the increase in number and severity of weather events. From the price of bread to the cost of a jar of peanut butter, we see the result.

Now you can lie about this all you want, but everyone now sees these prices increasing because of the impacts of weather on agriculture.

AGW causes inflation?

AGW causes a declining US dollar?

Yeah?

 

[Old Rocks]

http://chge.med.harvard.edu/publications/documents/agricultureclimate.pd

With regard to the potential future effects from climate change on U.S. agriculture, the following factors
are highlighted:


Expected temperature increases are likely to hasten the maturation of annual crop
plants, thereby reducing their total yield potential, with extremely high temperatures causing
more severe losses. Des Moines, Iowa, in the heart of the Corn Belt, currently experiences
fewer than 20 days per year with temperatures exceeding 90ºF. The number of days
with temperatures above 90ºF would double with a mean warming of 3.6ºF.


Climate change projections include an increased likelihood of both floods and droughts.
Variability of precipitation--in time, space, and intensity--will make U.S. agriculture
increasingly unstable and make it more difficult for U.S. farmers to plan what crops to
plant and when.


Higher temperatures and greater precipitation in some regions are likely to result in the
spread of plant pests and diseases. Higher temperatures reduce insect winterkill, and lead
to increased rates of development and shorter times between generations. Wet vegetation
promotes the germination of spores and the proliferation of bacteria, fungi, and nematodes.
Prolonged droughts can encourage other pests and diseases; especially those carried
by insects.

 

[Old Rocks]

Westwall, can you get any stupider? No hysteria, just plain facts and evidence. And confirmation of the facts and evidence in the grocery store.

We are no longer waiting to see what the consequences will be, we are experiancing them right now in the increasing weather events worldwide. The meteorlogical records and insurance records all confirm the increase in number and severity of weather events. From the price of bread to the cost of a jar of peanut butter, we see the result.

Now you can lie about this all you want, but everyone now sees these prices increasing because of the impacts of weather on agriculture.

AGW causes inflation?

AGW causes a declining US dollar?

Yeah?

Yes, you dumb fuck. Check out the price of a jar of peanut butter. Higher prices for the same thing is inflation. When the dollar buys less, it is declining.

Have you ever stopped to think for just a second before posting? Oh, right, this is Frankie boy, silly question to ask.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Westwall, can you get any stupider? No hysteria, just plain facts and evidence. And confirmation of the facts and evidence in the grocery store.

We are no longer waiting to see what the consequences will be, we are experiancing them right now in the increasing weather events worldwide. The meteorlogical records and insurance records all confirm the increase in number and severity of weather events. From the price of bread to the cost of a jar of peanut butter, we see the result.

Now you can lie about this all you want, but everyone now sees these prices increasing because of the impacts of weather on agriculture.

AGW causes inflation?

AGW causes a declining US dollar?

Yeah?

Yes, you dumb fuck. Check out the price of a jar of peanut butter. Higher prices for the same thing is inflation. When the dollar buys less, it is declining.

Have you ever stopped to think for just a second before posting? Oh, right, this is Frankie boy, silly question to ask.

Global Warming, and not annual trillion deficits, is causing a decline in the dollar?

Is that what you're saying?

 

[waltky]

Scientists Fear Armageddon Too...

Apocalypse Soon
Prophecies of impending doom — based on hard science as well as Scripture — abound. Where does our appetite for retribution come from?

Times Square and Hollywood Boulevard, cleaned up in recent years, remain icons of depravity, modern Sodom and Gomorrahs full of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, which is why last spring they were among the places one was most likely to come across the billboards set up by ninety-year-old Family Radio personality, retired civil engineer, and end time prophet Harold Camping, announcing, Judgment Day: May 21, 2011… Cry mightily unto God. In 1958, he helped start Family Radio in San Francisco, and since 1961 he has hosted a daily call-in show, Open Forum, on which he answers questions about the Bible. By the time he had Judgment Day: May 21 plastered across the United States, in English and Spanish, Family Radio owned almost 150 radio stations and affiliates and was wealthy enough to invest millions of dollars into disseminating bad news.

Camping cobbled together his idiosyncratic eschatology from his own Biblical calendar, initially published in 1970 as The Biblical Calendar of History. According to him, the world was created in 11,013 BC; the Flood took place in 4,990 BC; and Christ was crucified on Friday, April 1, AD 33. In his most recent works, We Are Almost There! and To God Be the Glory!, he writes that the Rapture would take place on May 21, 2011, immediately transporting the righteous — approximately 3 percent or just over 200 million of the world’s nearly seven billion inhabitants — to heaven. The remainder would be completely annihilated, along with the earth itself, on October 21. When May 21 rolled around, Camping, a twiggish, rail-thin figure with long grey sideburns who looks like an old-time country preacher, retreated to his suburban home in Alameda, California. Meanwhile, clutches of his followers gathered at the Family Radio compound, waiting for the ultimate moment. When the Rapture did not occur and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that would torment the earth for five months before its final destruction did not begin, he acknowledged in his folksy way that he was “flabbergasted,” suggesting that an “invisible judgment” had taken place, and anyway the real event was not until October.

While Camping may appear to be a nutty codger embarrassed by the ill-advised precision of his predictions (in June, he suffered a stroke and is still recovering at home, and his talk show has been cancelled), he has plenty of company, especially in the United States. In the nineteenth century, William Miller, an American Baptist preacher from upstate New York, predicted that Jesus Christ would return and the world would end on October 22, 1844. Like Camping, Miller arrived at his prophecy via an ad hoc mix of passages from the Hebrew prophets and a juggling of the Roman and Jewish calendars, but when the date finally arrived — thousands of his followers having sold all their possessions and gathered in fields, eyes turned to the heavens, to await the Rapture — nothing happened. After what has come to be called “the great disappointment,” excuses were made, calculations adjusted, new dates proposed.

Yet the disenchantment that follows unfulfilled predictions of the kind made by Miller, Camping, and others has by no means diminished the public appetite for the Apocalypse. New Age adherents of the 2012 prophecy, which has created an Internet frenzy and a small publishing industry, believe the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, on December 21, 2012, will coincide with the end of the world. Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), along with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series, which has sold more than 35 million books, eagerly anticipate the imminent conveyance of believers to heaven, and Armageddon for everyone else. Why all the doom? Why the persistent predictions of volcanic eruptions, mega-earthquakes, tidal waves, new ice ages, the obliteration of life as we know it, and even the annihilation of the earth itself?

More “Apocalypse Soon” by Daniel Baird | The Walrus | January 2012